This article introduces the task of visual question answering for remote sensing data (RSVQA). Remote sensing images contain a wealth of information, which can be useful for a wide range of tasks, including land cover classification, object counting, or detection. However, most of the available methodologies are task-specific, thus inhibiting generic and easy access to the information contained in remote sensing data. As a consequence, accurate remote sensing product generation still requires expert knowledge. With RSVQA, we propose a system to extract information from remote sensing data that is accessible to every user: we use questions formulated in natural language and use them to interact with the images. With the system, images can be queried to obtain high-level information specific to the image content or relational dependencies between objects visible in the images. Using an automatic method introduced in this article, we built two data sets (using low- and high-resolution data) of image/question/answer triplets. The information required to build the questions and answers is queried from OpenStreetMap (OSM). The data sets can be used to train (when using supervised methods) and evaluate models to solve the RSVQA task. We report the results obtained by applying a model based on convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for the visual part and a recurrent neural network (RNN) for the natural language part of this task. The model is trained on the two data sets, yielding promising results in both cases.

We present an Active Learning (AL) strategy for reusing a deep Convolutional Neural Network (CNN)-based object detector on a new data set. This is of particular interest for wildlife conservation: given a set of images acquired with an Unmanned Aerial Vehicle (UAV) and manually labeled ground truth, our goal is to train an animal detector that can be reused for repeated acquisitions, e.g., in follow-up years. Domain shifts between data sets typically prevent such a direct model application. We thus propose to bridge this gap using AL and introduce a new criterion called Transfer Sampling (TS). TS uses Optimal Transport (OT) to find corresponding regions between the source and the target data sets in the space of CNN activations. The CNN scores in the source data set are used to rank the samples according to their likelihood of being animals, and this ranking is transferred to the target data set. Unlike conventional AL criteria that exploit model uncertainty, TS focuses on very confident samples, thus allowing quick retrieval of true positives in the target data set, where positives are typically extremely rare and difficult to find by visual inspection. We extend TS with a new window cropping strategy that further accelerates sample retrieval. Our experiments show that with both strategies combined, less than half a percent of oracle-provided labels are enough to find almost 80% of the animals in challenging sets of UAV images, beating all baselines by a margin.

We present a method for learning discriminative filters using a shallow Convolutional Neural Network (CNN). We encode rotation invariance directly in the model by tying the weights of groups of filters to several rotated versions of the canonical filter in the group. These filters can be used to extract rotation invariant features well-suited for image classification. We test this learning procedure on a texture classification benchmark, where the orientations of the training images differ from those of the test images. We obtain results comparable to the state-of-the-art. Compared to standard shallow CNNs, the proposed method obtains higher classification performance while reducing by an order of magnitude the number of parameters to be learned.

Training convolutional neural networks (CNNs) for very high-resolution images requires a large quantity of high-quality pixel-level annotations, which is extremely labor-intensive and time-consuming to produce. Moreover, professional photograph interpreters might have to be involved in guaranteeing the correctness of annotations. To alleviate such a burden, we propose a framework for semantic segmentation of aerial images based on incomplete annotations, where annotators are asked to label a few pixels with easy-to-draw scribbles. To exploit these sparse scribbled annotations, we propose the FEature and Spatial relaTional regulArization (FESTA) method to complement the supervised task with an unsupervised learning signal that accounts for neighborhood structures both in spatial and feature terms. For the evaluation of our framework, we perform experiments on two remote sensing image segmentation data sets involving aerial and satellite imagery, respectively. Experimental results demonstrate that the exploitation of sparse annotations can significantly reduce labeling costs, while the proposed method can help improve the performance of semantic segmentation when training on such annotations. The sparse labels and codes are publicly available for reproducibility purposes. https://github.com/Hua-YS/Semantic-Segmentation-with-Sparse-Labels

Deep learning (DL) has proven to be a suitable approach for despeckling synthetic aperture radar (SAR) images. So far, most DL models are trained to reduce speckle that follows a particular distribution, either using simulated noise or a specific set of real SAR images, limiting the applicability of these methods for real SAR images with unknown noise statistics. In this article, we present a DL method, deSpeckNet,1 that estimates the speckle noise distribution and the despeckled image simultaneously. Since it does not depend on a specific noise model, deSpeckNet generalizes well across SAR acquisitions in a variety of landcover conditions. We evaluated the performance of deSpeckNet on single polarized Sentinel-1 images acquired in Indonesia, The Democratic Republic of Congo, and The Netherlands, a single polarized ALOS-2/PALSAR-2 image acquired in Japan and an Iceye X2 image acquired in Germany. In all cases, deSpeckNet was able to effectively reduce speckle and restore the images in high quality with respect to the state of the art.